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The score for The Emperor's Shadow was composed by Zhao Jiping. From the mid-80s to 2000, while Tan Dun was in the U.S., Zhao was the PRC's preeminent movie composer, working with most of the A-list directors. For Zhang Yimou he scored Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, Story of Qiu Ju and To Live. For Chen Kaige: Yellow Earth, The Big Parade, Farewell My Concubine, Temptress Moon and The Emperor and the Assassin. For Zhou Xiaowen: No Regrets and The Emperor's Shadow. For Sun Zhou: Heartstrings and Breaking the Silence. Of these 14 films, 10 starred the goddess Gong Li (who was Zhang's one-time mistress). For most of the 90s, she must have heard Zhao's stately music in her sleep.
To screen some of these movies again is to realize how important Zhao's scores are to the building of mood, the subtle underlining of character. But he was more than Zhang's regular composer; he was the director's cultured ears, and the one who set Zhang on the course that would eventually lead him to the Met and The First Emperor.
In 1995, when the Florence Opera House asked Zhang to direct an opera, he was both perplexed by the invitation and, frankly, ignorant of the medium. He discussed the commission with Zhao; all he knew was that the opera was something about a princess. As Zhang told Asia Source in 2004, Zhao "was excited and said that it might be Turandot, a very famous opera and the story was set in China. He talked a lot about Puccini and other basic knowledge of opera.... He found a videotape of Turandot for me. It was a version released by the New York Metropolitan Opera...but I still didn't understand what was being sung. The next day Zhao Jiping gave me a rough summary of the story, and suggested that I really should direct this opera even if it meant that I had to give up a film. Seeing that he was so into it, I faxed the Florence Opera house saying that I could consider directing it..."
PEKING OPERA BLUES
Zhang staged Turandot in 1997. Now he's hooked up with his old friend Tan Dun they knew each other in the early 80s, before the budding composer left China to study at Columbia University and devise his own musical entente between China and the West for what was probably the Met's most eagerly anticipated original production of the new millennium. Tan Dun's alchemic mixture of influences might produce an opera to span the globe: real world music. The Met promised the largest production since its War and Peace, suggesting that Zhang would take the visual splendor of Hero and House of Flying Daggers and Curse of the Golden Flower and duplicate it, expand and perfect it, on the giant stage. Might we also have some swordplay and wire work?
Well, they fooled us. The music is not so much a blend of East and West as a journey from East to West. The piece begins with traditional Peking opera: a singer-dancer intoning a sacrifice ritual in Chinese. (You'll get subtitles in the theaters, as we at the Met got translations on the backs of the seats we were facing.) Behind him, on 12 rows of bleachers than span the stage, a chorus of about 150 keened along. Once the plot kicks in, though, the music becomes westernized and, to these inexpert ears, neither daring in form nor instantly appealing in tune. The color scheme rigid and vivid in Hero, wonderfully lurid in Golden Flower is not so much subtle here as absent: grays, mostly, with rare and welcome splashes of bright tones in a carpet laid down under the bleacher steps in Act I, and the chorus outfitted in striking robes at the end.
The libretto, by Tan Dun and Chinese-American novelist Ha Jin, adheres to the contours of The Emperor's Shadow, but with a different ending: Jianli cuts out his own tongue, and the anthem he leaves to be sung is a slave song we heard at the beginning of Act 2. The writers have trouble marshalling the movie's dramatic pull; their lyrics don't put the personal conflicts across with the same clarity and intensity. Domingo, a trouper at 64, has the notes down but struggles with his enunciation. (Even though he's singing in English, we needed the subtitles.) Paul Groves gets all he can out of Gao Jianli, but the role as written here hasn't nearly the force of will, the sacred venom, that Ge You embodied in the film. Best among the principals is Elizabeth Futral as Yueyang: at once coquettish and ferocious, adroitly meeting the role's singing and acting requirements.
Do operas have play doctors, as the classic musicals often did? Old pros like George Abbott or Abe Burrows would join a show out of town, bring a fresh mind to the soft spots, punch up the book. By the time the thing opened on Broadway, it sang. The First Emperor could have used some outside help. For what disappoints me about the opera is not its music but its failure to transfer the thrilling drama of the movie to the stage.
The creators of The First Emperor were clearly intent on sharpening the film's (already pretty clear) political stance. "Qin Shi Huangdi was pretty much like Mao Zedong," Tan Dun told Martin Steinberg of The Associated Press. "He unified China. He made the language, made the measuring system, made the currency. ... But on the other hand, imagine how many other kingdoms' tribes he wiped out, how many other languages he destroyed, and the culture and books burned by him."
That's the dilemma The First Emperor summons the passion to explore: the uneasy, sometimes fatal relationship between art and government, the composer and the tyrant. You can expect that of Zhang Yimou, who suffered serious censorship restrictions on many of his early films, but who is now in charge of the entertainment for the 2008 summer Olympic games in Beijing. In this sense, even those he has staged it half a world away, The First Emperor is a risky statement, a declaration of war a war of nerve against the Emperor, the Chairman or the censor.
I wonder what the man to brought Nixon to Mao thought about that.